Hi Steve, I think I might have been Asian in a past life. Lol:) Signed up with Mailchimp for the same cheapskate reasons as you. Finding it OK but always wonder what I’m missing as all the “pros” use Aweber. Can you tell me with Aweber are you able to manually look at people who signed up but haven’t confirmed and then send them a polite reminder? Mailchimp seems to be missing that and I always wonder how many people I’m missing because of that!
Video has to be included in your marketing mix. So review your content and think about how you can turn it into a video. This could be animated video, something you shoot with your digital phone, or even hiring a production crew for a customized shoot. The return on investment can more than pay for itself as a well planned video can provide benefits for years.

Wherever your one person is, that’s where you want to be. Focus your time and energy on developing a following on just one or two sites. Otherwise you’ll spread yourself too thin. Share other people’s content along with your original content while you’re building up your blog. Determine the best posting frequency for each site and then automate scheduling and posting. Feedly, IFTT and Buffer are great for scheduling other people’s content and Hootsuite and Meet Edgar are great for scheduling original content.

Variations of “Hello {!firstname_fix}” have become the norm in email marketing, not the outlier. Because of that, it’s losing its effectiveness. You can still use name personalization, but you also want to think about going a step further. At AWeber, we recommend segmenting your audience and sending each segment tailored messages with unique subject lines.
Signup Forms: You can create a signup form for your website using one of hundreds of provided templates. There are many options for customization. Select from various form styles: inline, pop-over, pop-up, or lightbox. All utilize responsive design and will scale to mobile devices. You can also toggle Facebook sign-in, choose from several “Thank You” page options (including standard, audio, video, and no page), and select tracking options. AWeber provides both javascript and HTML code options, or if you just want to host your form with AWeber, they’ll do that too. You can also put a signup form on your Facebook business page.
Think about implementing referral links to incentivize your subscribers to spread awareness about your brand, too. Referral links allow your current customers to promote trackable links for your business. In exchange for sending new paying customers your way, you can give them incentives like discounts, coupons, vouchers, cash, prizes or redeemable points.